From War and Peace

In his Turin speech, published in his “War” collection, Harold Pinter warns that unless Europe finds the solidarity, intelligence, courage and will to challenge and resist US power, Europe will deserve Alexander Herz’s judgement.

But he still has high hopes for the growing opposition worldwide to what he describes as the American administration’s state terrorism.

Pinter’s hard-hitting “War “collection has provoked a reaction unsurpassed in modern poetry, from vilification to reverence and has helped earn him one of the highest honours for a modern writer on war.

Pinter received the Wilfred Owen Award - a commissioned sculpture - for “War” after being named by the Wilfred Owen Association. Among previous winners there has been the Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney.

Wilfred Owen Association chairman, Michael Grayer, said: “As one might expect, all are hard-hitting and uncompromising, written with lucidity, clarity and economy. The speech was widely reported in the press, and played a considerable part in galvanising public opposition to the war.”

Pinter’s opposition to the war and the subsequent occupation by American and British troops has continued unabated since the collection was published shortly before the invasion and in a recent debate at the Imperial War Museum described it as “criminal act of immense proportions and one which will have profound consequences throughout the world.”

“Tony Blair describes the insurgents as terrorists. There is clearly a body of foreign nationals which has entered Iraq since the invasion and which is committing terrorist atrocities,” said Pinter. “ But the heart of the insurgency is widespread Iraqi resistance to a brutal and savage military occupation. Cutting off somebody’s head is a barbaric act. But so is the dropping of cluster bombs on totally innocent people and tearing them apart.

“At least 20,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq and many thousands more mutilated for life. We don’t see the corpses or the mutilated children on television. But the invasion was also quite consistent with declared American foreign policy. American foreign policy now aims at ‘FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE’ – that is the US Administration’s term, not mine. Full spectrum dominance means control of air, sea land and space. It also of course means control of the world’s resources.

“The United States has over 700 military instillations in 132 countries, including this one. It already has a vast military base at Baghdad airport. These bases are not there by accident or for ‘humanitarian reasons’. They are there to keep a stranglehold on the world and they will do it by any means at their disposal.

And on the scandal concerning the torture of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Gharaib jail, he said the revelations should come as no surprise. “The Americans have been exporting torture for years. They have been teaching torture techniques to military representatives of various dictatorships at Fort Benning in Georgia for a very long time. Fort Benning was called the School of Americas but was actually known as the ‘School of torture’.

They practice it themselves at home, in the vast gulag of prisons across the United States where over two million people are held in custody, the majority black. Restraint chairs, where convicts are strapped and left naked in their own urine and excrement for days, the use of gas and stun guns, the random brutality, the systematic rape and abuse of young men and women – all of these things and more an affront to human dignity – are common practice. So torture in Iraq, at Bagram in Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay are simply par for the course. That is the nature of the beast.”

For Pinter it is simple - Bush and Blair are terrorists and should be tried in an international criminal court as war criminals and warns that the less easy the US finds things in Iraq, the more dangerous they become.

“But there is a growing resistance worldwide to this arrogant, brutal, complacent, destructive force, a force which holds the concept of International Law and the United Nations in contempt, and whose only vocabulary is bombs and death.

The United States possess more ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ than the rest of the world put together. It is at this moment developing new nuclear systems which it is prepared to use at the drop of a hat. It is totally indifferent to the death of others and will murder anyone who gets in its way. It is the most feared, most powerful and most detested nation the world has ever known.”

"Cutting off somebody’s head is a barbaric act. But so is the dropping of cluster bombs on totally innocent people and tearing them apart."